Social Media Is Inherently a Selfish Medium

In December 2015 heavy rain flooded the city of Chennai after the worst downpour in a century. Thousands were stranded on rooftops, and telephone lines failed. Within hours people were using Twitter and Facebook to share the addresses of those who needed rescue, to offer rooms, to organise boats and to coordinate donations. A Google spreadsheet of needs and offers circulated, and strangers who had never met organised themselves into relief groups under the hashtag #ChennaiRains. The episode is a reminder that the verdict of the topic, that social media is inherently a selfish medium, cannot be simply accepted.

The case for the claim is substantial. The central features of social media encourage the display of the self. A profile is an advertisement, a post a performance, and the number of likes, shares and followers the measure of success. The selfie, a portrait taken by oneself of oneself, was named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionaries in 2013. Users curate images of holidays, meals and achievements, and watch the response. Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell argued in The Narcissism Epidemic in 2009 that self admiration has risen in young Americans, and digital culture has been seen as both a symptom and an amplifier.

The commercial structure strengthens it. Platforms earn money from advertising, and advertising depends on attention. They therefore design their features to capture as much of it as possible, with endless scrolling, notifications and rewards that arrive unpredictably, like the payouts of a slot machine. Former employees of technology firms, such as Tristan Harris, have described how the design exploits psychological weaknesses. A medium that profits from keeping people looking has little reason to make them generous. Studies of what spreads online suggest that moral outrage and content that flatters the identity of the sharer travel furthest, so that the system rewards the performance of virtue as much as virtue itself. It makes each user the centre of a feed built to his tastes, a private world in which the self is everywhere reflected.

A medium that profits from keeping people looking has little reason to make them generous.

Research also finds that social comparison breeds envy and a sense of inadequacy. People see the best moments of others and compare them with their own ordinary lives. The experience of reading a feed can leave people with a sense of competition and self concern. Sherry Turkle writes in Alone Together that people are together on the networks but alone, performing for each other and listening little. Conversations are replaced by broadcasts, in which each person speaks and few listen. The structure can therefore push toward attention seeking and away from attention giving.

Yet the other side of the ledger is just as real. The Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014, in which people filmed themselves pouring cold water over their heads and nominated friends to do the same, raised over a hundred million dollars for research on motor neurone disease within a few months. Crowdfunding sites have raised money for operations, disaster relief and schools. After the Chennai floods, the earthquake in Nepal in 2015 and the Kerala floods of 2018, volunteers coordinated through social platforms in ways that official agencies could not match. Facebook introduced a Safety Check feature so that people in a disaster zone could mark themselves safe.

Social media has also given voice to people who were previously unheard. In the Arab uprisings of 2011 activists used it to organise protests and to show the world what was happening. In India the movement against sexual violence after 2012, and many campaigns for local causes, spread through hashtags. Patients with rare diseases find one another across continents, and lonely or isolated people find communities of interest. Teachers share lessons, and amateur scientists exchange data. These are not signs of a selfish medium but of a connecting one.

The weakness in the topic lies in the word inherently. A medium is a channel, and what flows through it depends on the people and the incentives. The telephone can be used to threaten or to console, and the printing press has carried both hatred and the Bible. Melvin Kranzberg observed that technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. The question is whether social media has features that push in a consistent direction. The evidence suggests that it has both, and that the push toward self display is a feature of its business model and its interface more than of any essential property.

Human nature plays a part. Before the internet, people showed off in drawing rooms, bragged at weddings and exaggerated in letters. Social media gives these old impulses a vast stage, with immediate response. What is new is the scale and the measurement, which turn vanity into a quantity that can be tracked and gamed. But the same impulses also include sympathy and cooperation, which find expression too. People post photographs of their dinners and also give money to strangers. The medium magnifies the whole range of human motive.

If social media is not inherently selfish, it can be shaped to be less so. Design changes, such as hiding the count of likes, limiting infinite scroll, rewarding thoughtful comment rather than outrage, and making it easy to give and to help, could shift the balance. Users can choose how they behave, to share what is useful, to credit others and to put the phone down. Regulation might require platforms to be transparent about how their algorithms work. The character of the medium is partly an outcome of choices that have not yet been made.

The deeper puzzle is that the same act can be both selfish and generous. A person who posts about a charity run is perhaps promoting himself and also raising funds, and who can say how much of each lay behind it? The motives are mixed, and so are the effects. The topic asks us to judge the medium, but the judgement would require reading the hearts of a billion users, who themselves would give conflicting accounts, and who may not know whether their giving is for the cause or for the audience that watches it.